It's been a good year fishing so far. I chalked up the big skunk on SE PA opening day, landing only a 24" carp and the opening day for the rest of the state saw high water and cool temperatures, which puts my stocked trout numbers at an all time low. Nonetheless, wild fish are going strong in PA and I'd rather target them on just about any given day.

I posted a brookie I picked up a month or so ago from a stream that is not ATW and does not flow into ATW. The stream does hold some wild browns and in addition to the brookie, I'm curious about a handful of other browns I've caught this year. They are all from streams that are not ATW and they do not flow into ATW. I'm starting to get really curious about trout movement. Wild? Stocked? Stealth stocked?

For control purposes, I've caught this fish three times; he is clearly wild

Some fish had apparently just finished a really nice sized meal when I caught them. It makes me wonder how big these fish would grow if they had a constant food source, such as they had in the day(s) before I landed them.

I don't begrudge anyone to fish any stream in the state, and I'm sure I've caused the demise of a handful of fish over the years myself, but I've been seeing a wee bit too many of these:

I've found myself fishing mainly wild brown trout streams this year. One reason for that is I changed jobs and my trip home each day used to take me past a number of wild brookie streams, which made for easy stopping and an hour or two of fishing. Now they're out of the way and I find myself using my free Saturday mornings to target browns instead. This past Saturday morning, I decided it was time to renew the acquaintance. I broke a little 7 piece 3wt rod on a backpacking trip a few years ago and finally got around to packing it up and sending it back to Redington over the winter. They no longer make that model so they replaced it with a Wayfarer 6 instead. I'm heading out on a packing trip in about ten days and I wanted to make sure that I liked the rod before planning to rely on it for a few days. With the warm weather, dries were definitely on the casting list and I selected a Royal Wulff as the fly to use. I wasn't sure how the morning would go, as the first fly I picked had the hook eye filled in with head cement and I managed to break the hook eye with the eye reamer on my hemostats. But the next one cleaned out fine and I was off to try out the rod. It did not disappoint and I found myself reacquainting myself with brookies. Most were dinks but there were a few that were legal. I had a bit of a timeline to stick to so I drew an imaginary line on the map and knew I had two holes to fish remaining, below that line. On the second to last hole, I missed a smaller fish. My next cast, I hooked up with a dead hemlock branch on my back cast. By this time, the fly itself was pretty water logged, from fishing with it for two hours, so it was more like fishing a wet dry fly. My next cast went to the head of the pool and started to sink. That sixth sense told me to set the hook, and the 11th fish of the day came to hand. It taped at 11", which is my biggest Lancaster County wild brookie to date.

Nice post and pics salmonoid. FWIW I’d vote wild on each of the first 4 Browns…Pics 1 and 3 nearly certain, 2 and 4 maybe 65/35 wild. It helps to a degree that I know the general area you found them in and that probably leans me more toward wild even.

Very nice Brookie too…I’ve struggled on bigger Brookies so far this year. I’ve had many in the 7-8” range, but nothing bigger so far in 2013.

Nice write-up and some beautiful fish. Thanks for sharing your mid season report. I have caught some of the best local wild brownies that I have ever caught this year. Your report has given me a lot of hope and incentive for the chance to catch some really nice fish in the future. I have an awful lot to learn and many areas to explore. Nice job!